The months drag on. This summer of 1918 is the bloodiest and the hardest. The days are like angels in blue and gold, rising up untouchable above the circle of destruction. Everyone knows that we are losing the war. Nobody talks about it much. We are retreating. We won’t be able to attack again after this massive offensive. We have no more men and no more ammunition.
But the campaign goes on – the dying continues.
Summer, 1918. Never has life in its simplest outline seemed so desirable to us as it does now; the poppies in the fields near our base camp, the shiny beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings in the cool, half-dark rooms, black, mysterious trees at twilight, the stars and the streams, dreams and the long sleep. Oh life, life, life!
Summer, 1918. Never has more been suffered in silence as in the moment when we set off for the front. The wild and urgent rumours of an armistice and peace have surfaced again, they disturb the heart and make setting out harder than ever.
Summer, 1918. Never has life at the front been more bitter and more full of horror than when we are under fire, when the pallid faces are pressed into the mud and the fists are clenched and your whole being is saying, No! No! No, not now! Not now at the very last minute!
Summer, 1918. A wind of hope sweeping over the burnt-out fields, a raging fever of impatience, of disappointment, the most agonizing terror of death, the impossible question: why? Why don’t they stop? And why are there all these rumours about it ending?
There are so many airmen here, and they are so skilful that they can hunt down individuals like rabbits. For every German aircraft there are five British or American ones. For every hungry, tired German soldier in the trenches there are five strong, fresh men on the enemy side. For every German army-issue loaf there are fifty cans of beef over there. We haven’t been defeated, because as soldiers we are better and more experienced; we have simply been crushed and pushed back by forces many times superior to ours.
Several weeks of steady rain lie behind us – grey skies, grey, liquid earth, grey death. When we go out the damp penetrates right through our coats and uniforms – and it is like that all the time we are at the front. We can never get dry. Anyone who still has a pair of boots ties them up at the top with little bags of sand to stop the muddy water getting in so quickly. Rifles are caked in mud, uniforms are caked in mud, everything is fluid and liquefied, a dripping, damp and oily mass of earth in which there are yellow puddles with spiral pools of blood, and in which the dead, the wounded and the living are slowly swallowed up.
The storm is like a whiplash over us, the hail of shrapnel wrenches the sharp, children’s cries of the wounded from the confusion of grey and yellow, and in the night shattered life groans itself painfully into silence.
Our hands are earth, our bodies mud and our eyes puddles of rain. We no longer know whether we are still alive or not.
Then heat steals into our shell holes, damp and oppressive, like a jellyfish, and on one of these late summer days, Kat topples over. I am alone with him. I bandage the wound. His shin seems to be shattered. Damage to the bone, and Kat groans in despair. ‘Now of all times! Why did it have to be now… ?’
I comfort him. ‘Who knows how much longer the whole mess will go on? At least you’re out of it…’
The wound begins to bleed a lot. Kat cannot stay where he is while I try and find a stretcher. I don’t know where the nearest casualty post is, either.
Kat is not very heavy; so I take him on my back and carry him to the rear, to the dressing station.
Twice we stop to rest. Being carried is causing him a lot of pain. We don’t talk much. I’ve undone the neck of my tunic and I’m breathing heavily and sweating, and my face is red from the effort of carrying him. In spite of that I make us move on, because the terrain is dangerous.
‘All right to move, Kat?’
‘I have to be, Paul.’
‘Let’s go.’
I help him up. He stands on his good leg and steadies himself against a tree. Then I get hold of his wounded leg very carefully, he pushes upwards, and I get my arm under the knee of his good leg.
Moving becomes more difficult. Often, shells whistle past. I go as fast as I can, because the blood from his wounded leg is dripping on to the ground. We can’t ready protect ourselves from shell-blast, because it is over before we could have taken cover.
We get down in a small shed crater until it quietens down a bit. I give Kat some tea from my flask. We smoke a cigarette. ‘Yes, Kat,’ I say sadly, ‘we’d get split up now after all.’
He says nothing, and just looks at me.
‘Kat, do you still remember how we bagged that goose? And how you got me out of the scrap when I was still a raw recruit and I’d just been wounded for the first time? I cried, then, Kat, and it was nearly three years ago.’
Kat nods.
The fear of loneliness weds up in me. If Kat is taken out I’d have no friends here at all.
‘Kat, we must get in touch again, if peace ready does come before you get back.’
‘With what’s happened to the old leg, do you reckon I’d ever be fit for service again?’ he asks bitterly.
‘You’d be able to convalesce in peace and quiet. The joint is still OK. Maybe it will all be all right.’
‘Give me another cigarette,’ he says.
‘Maybe we could do something or other together afterwards, Kat.’ I am very sad, it is impossible that Kat, my friend Kat, Kat with the drooping shoulders and the thin, soft moustache, Kat, whom I know in a different way from every other person, Kat, the man I have shared these years with – it is impossible that I might never see Kat again.
‘Give me your address anyway, Kat. Here’s mine, I’ll write it down for you.’
I tuck the piece of paper into the breast-pocket of my tunic. I feel so isolated already, even though he is still sitting there with me. Maybe I should shoot myself in the foot, just so that I can stay with him?
Suddenly Kat makes a choking noise and goes greenish-yellow. ‘We’d better move,’ he stammers.
I jump up, eager to help him. I hoist him up and set off with long, slow strides so as not to shake his leg too much.
My throat is parched and I have red and black spots before my eyes by the time I eventually stumble, doggedly and relentlessly, into the casualty station.
There I drop to my knees, but I have enough strength left to fall on to the side where Kat’s good leg is. After a few minutes I ease myself up slowly. My legs and my hands are still shaking violently, and I have trouble finding my flask to take a drink out of it. My lips tremble as I do so. But Kat is safe.
After a time I am able to distinguish sounds from the barrage of noise battering in my ears.
‘You could have saved yourself the trouble[263],’ says an orderly.
I stare at him uncomprehending.
He points to Kat. ‘He’s dead.’
I can’t understand what he means. ‘He’s got a lower leg wound,’ I say.
The orderly stops. ‘Yes, that as well…’
I turn round. My eyes are still dimmed, I have started to sweat again and it is running into my eyes. I wipe it away and look at Kat. He is lying still. ‘Must have fainted,’ I say quickly.
The orderly whistles softly. ‘I know more about it than you do. He’s dead. I’ll bet you anything.’
I shake my head. ‘Can’t be. I was talking to him not ten minutes ago. He’s fainted.’
Kat’s hands are warm. I get hold of his shoulders to give him some tea to bring him round. Then I feel how my fingers are getting wet. When I take my hands out from behind his head they are bloody. The orderly whistles between his teeth. ‘Told you so —’
Without my noticing it, Kat got a splinter of shrapnel in the head on the way. It’s only a little hole. It must have been a tiny, stray fragment. But it was enough. Kat is dead.